1261-1264 – Christian mobs sack Jewish sections of London and Canterbury.

1267 – St. Thomas Aquinas declares that Jews cannot be treated as neighbors and must live in perpetual servitude to Christians.

1270 – Jews massacred across Germany.

1280 – Spanish Jews forced to listen to conversion sermons from monks preaching in their own synagogues.

1290 – King Edward I orders all Jews out of England.

1298 – A German nobleman named Rindfleisch gathers a small army and leads it against the Jews (who were accused of desecrating the sacred elements used in Holy Communion [the Host] in an alleged attempt to crucify Christ all over again). More than 100,000 Jews are slaughtered and some 140 of their communities wiped out.

1306 – King Philip IV of France gives the Jews one month to get out of the country. They may only take the clothes on their back and provisions for one day. Philip confiscates what they leave behind for his own use. In 1315, King Louis X generously allows them to come back provided that they agree to wear badges.

1320 – 120 Jewish communities in southern France and northern Spain wiped out during the so-called “Crusade of the Shepherds” as 40,000 peasants rage over the countryside, demanding that Jews convert or die.

1348-49 – Thousands of Jews blamed for the Black Death across Europe and massacred: 2000 in Strasburg, 6000 in Mainz, 3000 in Breslau, 500 in Brussels, 10,000 in Poland. Jewish communities in Augsburg, Wurzburg, Munich and over 200 other places utterly destroyed.

1354 – 12,000 Jews slaughtered in Toledo, Spain.

1389 – 3000 Jews slaughtered in Prague after children accidentally spray sand on a priest carrying a holy wafer host.

1391 – 50,000 Jews die in riots instigated by the preaching of Archdeacon Ferrand Martinez of Seville; another 150,000 are forcibly baptized, including many rabbis.

1407 – Vincent Ferrer, a monk, leads mobs against the Jews in Spain.

1422 – Crusade against the Hussites destroys Jewish communities along the Rhine.

1434 – Council of Basle, led by Pope Eugenius IV, bans Jews from the universities, orders them to live apart from others, and mandates their attendance at sermons aimed at their conversion.

1480-81 – King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain establish a tribunal to purge the Church of those who clandestinely practice Judaism. Massive arrests follow. An estimated 30,000 are burned at the stake.

1492 – All Jews expelled from Catholic Spain. Many flee to Portugal where King John II enslaves them. After John’s death in 1495, his successor, Manuel I, agrees to “purify” Portugal of their presence as a condition of his marriage to Isabella, daughter of Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella. Some Jews are thrown out of the country; many are forced to undergo brutal baptisms. In 1506, many of these “new Christians” are massacred during anti-Jewish riots in Lisbon.

“During a single night in 1506 nearly four thousand Lisbon Jews were put to the sword.” – William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, p. 35.

1509 – Dominican monk Johannes Pfefferkorn publishes Judenspiegel (“Mirror of the Jews”), an anti-Semitic book urging that all works in Hebrew be burned. Those who disagree with Pfefferkorn are accused of being on the payroll of the Jews.

Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian orders everything hostile to Christianity destroyed. Some 1500 manuscripts are taken from Jews in Frankfort alone.

1543 – Martin Luther vehemently attacks the Jews in a series of tracts known as “On the Jews and Their Lies.” He urges that their cash and jewels be seized, their synagogues burned, and their homes broken down.

1553 – Pope Julius III condemns the Talmud. One month later – on Rosh Hashanah – a mountain of Jewish books is burned in Rome. Talmud burning spreads across Italy.

1555 – Pope Paul IV issues the papal bull known as Cum nimis absurdum (“Since it is absurd and improper that Jews…”). All old anti-Jewish regulations are reaffirmed and new ones are added: Jews in the papal states are confined to ghettos, and their commercial activities with Christians are limited to the sale of second-hand clothes. These rules will remain in force for more than 300 years.

“Attacks and expulsions of Jews were a staple of medieval history, so extensive that by the mid-1500s Christians had forcibly emptied most of western Europe of Jews.” – Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, p. 53

“In the measure to which Christianity lost much of its hold on Western society the Jews’ lot improved markedly. Intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment such as Lessing [1729-1781] and Montesquieu [1689-1755] were sympathetically disposed towards Jews, stressing their dignity ad humanity, even making them the embodiment of their own humanitarian ideals.” – Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions, p. 41

“There were periodic persecutions, massacres, and expulsions of Jews until the 18th century, when the Enlightenment brought Europe a new religious freedom.” – The Encyclopedia Britannica, “Anti-Semitism”

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